Monday, November 23, 2009

Crowd shots and walk cycles. Two of my least favorite things to animate, and coincidentally, the two shots which have been plaguing me for the past week. They're both for the Teenage Bottlerocket video I'm working on, and I finally finished cleaning them up, and they look pretty coool- so check 'em out.

First out the gait (wamp wamp) is the walk cycle. This was a little tough because it was a 2 point perspective walk. Here's the initial rough test. Matt helped me look it over and figure it out. I didn't approach it with the best geometric planning, but eventually I came out with this.

Here's a quicktime version for better viewing.

Next up is the crowd shot. Oy vey, this took a while to do, but to see it in motion is pretty satisfying.

Surprisingly, it doesn't take too many drawings to create a convincing loop of a jump. The two characters jumping in the back are only 4 drawings. The girl in the front has a little hop and some extra follow-through, so she's 7 drawings.

What it looks like with all the layers on at once

The head nod of the girl with glasses took a little bit to figure out. In the end, it was also only 4 drawings of her moving her head up and down in an even motion. At first, I had her jerking her head up and down, to try and emphasize her nodding to a beat. It looked too much like her boyfriend with the glasses was ramming her from behind, so had to scrap and rework it. I think the final product with looks fairly non-sexual, so I'm happy with it. But the seed has been planted, so maybe now that's all you can see in it.

That's all folks, for now. Sweet dreams until I finish another interesting shot.